Conclusion
Introduction
This paper covers a lot of ground. I hope that some of it will give you
new ways to look at how we do and can construct relationships, have sex,
and live our lives. All of these things are mutable, and redesigning the
context in live can change the way we live. Also, remember—sleep with
your local designer! The future of sex depends on it.
Eleanor Saitta
Structure Light Design Research Collective
ella@sldrc.com
@dymaxion
Objects, experiences, and systems are all products of design and have
a huge effect on every aspect of our lives, in ways we often do not even
realize. Sex and relationships are, of course, no exception. Social desires
feed technological changes as they fund, prioritize and permit research,
but the objects and concepts that come from those changes affect society
too. Can we subvert those desires through design?
Social change requires mass disruption—individual hacking can at
best prefigure and rehearse it. When technology changes society, the
change starts slowly and accelerates and accumulates as it goes. Five years
of change barely registers, but twenty can change society to the point
where it is almost unrecognizable. Compounded over time, design can
be a profoundly disruptive social force. Knowing what might be later
opens our eyes to what can be now, and the fictional future can teach us
about what is really transgressive in the actual present—it permits us to
see our context from the outside.
It's going to get pretty weird around here. In this paper, we will
explore this territory using design fictions as a lens. Specifically, we are
going to examine some of the following questions, which were used to
generate the fictions we will see:
 Intimacy
• How can artifacts and services enable new forms of intimacy, and
in doing so, alter the constraints under which it acts?
• Does virtualizing intimacy help or hurt real, modern
relationships?
• Can we qualitatively change the kind of sex we are capable of?
Identity
• Can redesigning the experience of sexual interaction profoundly
change the interactees?
• Can an artifact alter our socio-sexual identity?
work, technically, but it's very difficult to create that sort of social
structure without support from the environment.
Even if the group can afford to have custom construction work done,
it is difficult or impossible to build housing like that, between building
code requirements and banks that won't lend money for non-traditional
structures. Needless to say, economically disadvantaged parents, who
could benefit even more from a collective structure, are even less likely to
be able to find or create such housing.
There are almost certainly a wide variety of housing types which
should be investigated, along with the corresponding relationship
structures that they‘d support. Until we can get variety into the available
housing stock, heteronormative relationship structures will retain a huge
amount of power.

Awareness
• How does making difference visible change society?
• Can we change sex by intermediating it?
• Can mediated social awareness empower networks of sexual
change?

Control
• How can design shift the locus of control in the interactions that
revolve around sex?
• Can we create entire new vectors of sexual control, or erase old
ones?

Economics
• Can we enable in people the power to escape rigid
heteronormative economic relationships?
• Can designed changes to sexual economics act as a disruptive
social force?
Relevant to: Economics, Identity and Control
Timeline: Now
Family Cohousing
The economic structures of heteronormative relationships reinforce
those relationships in the culture to an impressive degree. If we want to
break the pattern of relationship structures, we have to break the
economic relations that create, support, and enforce them. Divorcing
economic structures from reproduction is just as fundamental of a social
change as divorcing sex from reproduction is. This, of course, is an
amazingly complex problem, many parts of which have more to do with
social norms and economics than design. One area that is intimately
connected to design, however, is the way those heteronormative
economic reactions are programmed into and enforced by the built
environment, the architecture around us, the houses we live in.
Raising children is hard. Some form of income and labor sharing is
hard to do without, and it strains the resources even of many couples.
The dominance of the intimate couple as the core of the family unit is
reflected in housing, and attempts to construct alternate sharing
arrangements literally don't fit.
Picture a group of three to five people, all either raising their own
children or committed to help raise the children of other people in the
group, but none of them involved with each other,although they may
have partners, even serious long-term ones, outside of the group. Where
do they live?
One model would be a cluster of small apartments, each with a
bedroom each for the parent and the child or children, a separate
bathroom and a small private living area. All of the apartments would
share a common kitchen and living area. Trying to shoehorn that
relationship structure into a set of more traditional apartments might
A Note On Politics and Possibility
The fictions in this paper tread right around the line of possibility. In
general, everything we are considering is firmly in the realm of the
known possible—often not something we can realize immediately, with
some notable exceptions, but not so far out on the development curve
that we cannot understand it—the near future, where design becomes
meaningfully possible. To understand how far out we may be looking,
each fiction will note an approximate timeline of when it might be
meaningfully possible. To the extent that the distinction matters, the
fictions here are primarily all about designed objects, environments, or
systems, even if they are very tightly integrated with the body. We will
mostly avoid the territory of genetic engineering and similar issues.
It is worth noting here that just as many of the questions we are
asking are not directly sexual, or even purely relevant to intimate
relationships, many of the fictions are not either—if for no other reason
than that sex is both necessarily political and heavily embedded in its
lived context. It is this more complicated territory that we address here.
Some of these fictions are intended as positive statements, but many of
them are more ambiguous. The world will change, whether or not we
really want it to.
Relevant to: Economics, Identity and Control
Timeline: Now

Nontraditional Group Legal Structures

Gay marriage is fine and all, but really, is that even what we want?
Congratulations, the heteronormative relationship contract has been
extended one tiny notch. Why not fight to blow it out of the water,
instead?
In the 1886 decision in the Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific
Railroad case, corporations were granted rights as natural persons, with
almost no precedent. Throughout their history, corporations have proved
to be fascinatingly flexible legal entities. Why not use that same
structural construct and design a modular structure of contracts to
enable a whole spectrum of legal relationships between whatever groups
of people decide they want a legal relationship? Of course, designing a
set of contracts and ensuring that they'll be legally enforceable are
different matters, but without an existing model, there's nothing to fight
for.
the family can breastfeed a new child, that problem largely goes away. Of
course, the existing construction of masculinity would be challenged by Relevant to: Identity and Awareness
this, but is that a bad thing?
Timeline: 5 years

Modern Flagging

Fractured identities complicate meeting people in a situated manner.

Things like flagging (from the BDSM world) do not really generalize
across social groups, but personal ad sites at best add another layer of
division—after all, other people have to opt in to the site. The usual
mechanisms of subculture work, but they lack any kind of geographic
referent—the people you see at the club across town are not the people
you see at the corner store. How do you find out if the woman next door
is into the same things as you? Subcultures and sexual diversity can
alienate us from our surroundings even when they do not need to,
making the lack of commonality the default assumption.
If you believe privacy is dead, why wait for people to announce they
are looking?
You walk into a grocery store. Your phone looks around, figures out
whom all the other phones belong to, and then drift-nets through their
data shadows. You get notified, while picking out tomatoes, that the cute
woman by the fruit really likes getting choked. You go say “Hi.”
The mobile parts of a system like this are mostly trivial—the only
hardware support needed is a bit more locative space-awareness and
phones that are a bit more promiscuous with identities. Filtering the data
shadow is the interesting part—semantic web style analysis, social
network enumeration, heuristic analysis of past interactions (“If you
liked sleeping with Susan, you'll love Mary!”), and careful use of all of
the (increasing amount) of relevant information people put online.
There is an argument, of course, that there is a standard of public
propriety that keeps us from thinking about sex in that very public
context, but should there be? Is keeping sex out of public space actually
creating the kind of sexual culture we want to live in? On the other
hand, there are some implications of a system like this that are pretty Relevant to: Intimacy, Identity, Economics and Control
scary—sexualizing public space is a double-edged sword in the real world
Timeline: Now
of stalking, rape, and rampant misogyny.

Enabling Nontraditional Reproductive Groups

This concept and the next are less design-related than most of the
rest, but they have implications that are too interesting to pass up.
Given the biological complication of a pregnancy, it seems unlikely
that we'll see reproduction literally and completely divorced from sex any
time soon. That said, gene manipulation has already allowed us to create
embryos with more than one genetic mother, more than one genetic
father, etc. This is obviously a good start toward a non-traditional
reproductive family unit.
Breastfeeding is a fascinating and complex interaction with a new
child; we're still learning all of the things it does. Among other things, it
appears to encourage an emotional bond above and beyond the intimacy
of the experience. There's also a transmission of disease immunity via
breast milk. Traditionally, of course, breastfeeding only occurs with the
birth mother, not other members of the family (excepting wet nurses).
This is limiting even in traditional heteronormative families, as the
father is excluded from this relationship.
Medically, though, there's no reason for this—inducing lactation is
medically trivial, for both men and women. Why not use this ability to
redesign the non-traditional family unit? Criticisms are leveled at
non-traditional families raising children for not having a natural
connection to the child. Obviously, these are more politically motivated
than they are motivated by any meaningfully objective understanding,
but why not redesign that relationship further, to strengthen that natural
connection? As it is, breastfeeding is frequently complicated for mothers
who want to work, acting as another site enforcing the heteronormative
economic relationship of motherhood. If all of the care-giving adults in
Relevant to: Intimacy, Awareness and Control
Timeline: Now
Emergency Bootcall
Fuck buddies are great. Everyone should have at least a half dozen.
Scheduling, though, royally sucks.
You decide you'd like to get laid tonight, but you don't really have
anyone specific in mind. So you send out an SMS to the Emergency
Bootycall System. It propagates out, first going to your A-list, and then if
no one has taken you up on it, your B-list and your C-list. You've told
the system that you'd like dinner beforehand as well, so the system looks
at the preferences you and the respondent have both set and selects a
location. It looks at your calendars, figures out when you're both going
to be off work, and sets a time, and if necessary, sends a reservation
request.
Say everyone you already know is busy. The system asks you if you
like to throw out a wider net. Maybe you'd like a surprise. You tell the
system to set up a date. It tells you to be at a specific place and time, and
you meet someone there. You've already told it what you're looking for,
in general and tonight, and it knows who's off limits. The people whom
you’ve slept with have vouched for you, in a distributed reputation
system, and other people have decided how much they trust those
people's opinions, and about what, so when a stranger sees your request,
they have a measure of what the community thinks of you, and how
distant you are socially.
Relevant to: Identity and Awareness
Timeline: 5 years
Visible Identities
Fashion and body language, while both ubiquitous and versatile,
have their limits as a medium to surface identity. Not only that, but they
feed things we do not always want to feed. Want to show the world that
you opted out as a consumer? Great, there are product lines for that. The
complicated details of a modern identity cannot always be easily read in
person—see femme dyke invisibility, for instance. Turning our bodies
into physical billboards only goes so far, can only express some identities,
and is really quite inflexible—subtlety, the complexity of a person, gets
lost.
Why bother trying to make a complex identity fit into the
commoditized physical world? Splash it around your virtual self! Replace
the image of you that people see with a mutable full-body avatar, and
show the world an entirely different identity, without any of the
complications of physical objects. Don’t want to push things that far?
How about a simple set of icons that can stand in for different facets of
your identity and show off different slices of your data?
For anyone who has not been watching it explode over the past few
years, augmented reality involves digital information, either in some
rendered form or just simple text or flat graphics being inserted into a
video stream shot in real time from the viewer's position. For example,
one can hold up a phone to a scene, and have it act as a lens, appearing
roughly transparent. The information overlaid is located positionally in
the world, augmenting the view you have of the space.
AR has been exploding for a lot of reasons, and it seems pretty likely
that it will continue to become an important component of how we
interact with the world. Currently, short-range object locations and
graphic registration are challenging for a lot of systems, especially
lightweight ones—they are far better at overlaying data on building-scale
objects and at map- scale distances. Registration and location will
continue to improve as the technology matures. In order to be socially
interesting, however, some degree of ubiquity is required, as with the
previous fiction, at least among the class of people with whom you are
interacting. Using AR to surface identity requires not only deep
penetration of AR, but fairly regular, if not continuous use of it—your
augmented identity will not be visible if no one looks. The notion that
one might end up presenting completely different identities to different
social classes is also interesting, if undesirable—the creation of a class of
social have-nots, economically locked out from large swaths of not only
culture but immediate personal presentation.
artificial legs, including legs which let her run at or above the peak
efficiency of a so-called normal human, told a fascinating story during a
TED talk. She has a dozen different pairs of legs that she wears for
different occasions, including a pair that makes her several inches taller.
The first time she wore them, to a party, a friend was shocked to see how
tall she was, actually exclaiming how unfair it was—I mean, prosthetics
are never supposed to make someone more able than “normal”, right?
The prostheses she uses are static, not even powered, let alone wired
into the nervous system. Additionally, the structural requirements for leg
prostheses are more complicated than those for arms, as fewer shapes will
accommodate walking. With arms, we can explore different forms, and
we can even look at solutions entirely outside simulations of standard
vertebrate bone-and- muscle movement.
Another interesting area of research emerging research involves what
is called soft body robotics—basically, things that move by the same
mechanisms as slugs, worms, caterpillars, or jellyfish. Instead of having a
rigid skeleton with rigid joints that are actuated, soft volumes of
tissue-like things change shape and volume. For example, one current
Department of Defense research project involves a surveillance robot
that can move like an earthworm and can change its shape, so it can
squeeze under a thin gap under a door or a through narrow pipe.
Fabricating soft-body robots is, needless to say, very complicated.
However, there's a lot of promise in 3D printing technologies, especially
multi-material printing techniques.
Combining these different technologies, we see a fairly realistic path
to construct a functional tentacle, either as a replacement limb, or
possibly even just as an additional limb. The process won't be either fast
or easy, but there's no reason to believe it's not possible, and not that far
off.
How will people react, the first time they see a person with a tentacle
for an arm walking down the street? How will they react the first time
they end up in bed? If you lost an arm, what would you want to replace
it with?
of things, including stroke recovery and chronic pain. More importantly
for us, it is also being used for modern prosthetics. Relevant to: Awareness and Control
Using a combination of implanted sensing electrode grids and Timeline: 15 years
FES-style driven electrodes, a prosthesis can be attached to the ends of
the nerves at an amputation site. Initially, the nerves will send and
receive mostly noise, but via training on both the inputs and the output,
a person can become attuned to the prosthesis. Their brain rewires itself
Avoiding Ambient Indoctrination
as needed until they can use the prosthesis relatively transparently. One
of the fascinating features of neuroplasticity, however, is that while it is
helpful to use motor neurons for connections intended to move things,
and sensing neurons for stimulation, it is
Advertising is, generally speaking, a very important source of cultural
perfectly possible, with training, to drive a prosthetic arm from a propagation in late capitalism. Specifically, advertising, as a core
patch of nerve endings on the upper chest, for instance. This is component of popular culture intended explicitly to cultivate desire, has
sometimes useful therapeutically when the amputation site is not suitable a strong effect on things like body image and the sexualities that are
for connecting a prosthesis and also interesting for our purposes. visible to us.
Prosthetics like this are on the cutting edge of what is currently possibly
Several years ago, São Paolo banned outdoor ads. Why wait for that
with today's technology, not anything that is in wide deployment. There
to spread? It would take a fairly intrusive AR system, but in theory, you
are many challenges here, of course, including the number of nerve
could literally have AdBlock for reality—imagine walking through a city
connections that a surgeon can make—even a dozen is fairly challenging,
without the visual assault of hyper-perfect heteronormative bodies, or
let alone hundreds or thousands.
riding mass transit without being told all the ways your body is inferior.
Penetrating the skin is a big current problem for prosthetics, both for
Of course, this goes both ways—what happens when the spammers
wiring up electrodes and for physical connections to mechanically
(or worse, the “legitimate marketers”) start to plaster themselves all over
anchor the limb. Creating structural connections to bones inside the
augmented realities? A potential escape becomes another front.
body is, if not easy, then at least reasonably well understood—see joint
replacement technology, for instance. In order to connect a prosthesis,
however, there must be a mechanical connection to something that is by
definition outside of the body. One of the most promising routes
forward here involves gum tissue—cultured and transplanted onto the
site of the attachment, it might provide that bridge.
This research is all aimed at traditional therapeutic implants, of
course. Attitudes around prosthetics are a fascinating microcosm of how
society treats disability and medicine in general. Research is almost
always aimed at trying to bring a disabled person back to the social
norm. However, once the basic integration with the human form is
working well, the range of possibilities is huge. Aimee Mullins, a
double-leg amputee who has done a lot of ground- breaking work in
Relevant to: Intimacy, Identity, Awareness and Control
Timeline: 25 years
Making Sex Safe Again
The sexual revolution at the end of the Modern period in the 60’s
and 70’s was brought about, socially, by many things, and enabled by a
whole host of others. Chief among the enablers was the Pill, which
suddenly made sex less serious, divorcing it from reproduction. In the
80’s and 90’s, HIV and the rise of at least the awareness of rape culture
made sex serious again, ushering in what might be called late
heteronormativity. What if we could get rid of that seriousness again?
Picture yourself out drinking at a bar. There is a woman there with
whom you have definite chemistry, but you just met. Still, you would
both really like to get laid tonight, but you forgot to bring gloves. So,
you both get out your phones. You might exchange numbers, but mostly
you are trading a limited medical authorization. You press your phone
against her abdomen and tap a button to wake up her implant, and then
send a status query. The report comes back happily green on all the STI
antibody tracking data, and your phone confirms the device signature.
She checks you, and you head for the door.
Implantable medical devices are advancing rapidly these days.
Currently, most implants are special-purpose devices focusing primarily
on various kinds of therapeutic electrical stimulation. This is changing
rapidly, though. Many devices are already capable of sensing a broad
range of physiological parameters. Manufacturers have been working for
some time on drug-dispensing implants. Implants which are intended
for purely diagnostic purposes are starting to show up on the market,
albeit slowly—implant manufacturers are very conservative.
In the research world, work is being done on communicating
networks of implants. For instance, one might have one implant looking
Relevant to: Intimacy and Identity
Timeline: 15 years
Soft Body Tentacles
Profound alterations of the body are a longstanding fantasy for many
people. They hold as much or more possibility of changing how we see
each other, and were we draw the lines on what human means. Not to
mention a whole lot of really hot sex.
Sadly, they are unlikely to become within the reach of our medical
technology for a while yet. Even compared to the kinds of fairly invasive
modifications we have talked about previously, large-scale body
modifications appear to remain extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Biomechanical hybrid systems, on the other hand, are potentially a
different issue.
Would you give up an arm to have a prehensile tentacle in its place,
assuming it could sense at least pressure and temperature?
Several emerging technologies are very promising when looking at
biomechanically fictionalized bodies. The first involves functional
electrical stimulation, a specific kind of electrical stimulation of the
nerves. FES uses an external (or eventually, implanted) neuroprosthesis
to stimulate nerves that have been injured. Current work has allowed
paraplegic patients to stand and walk, and restored hand grasp function
to quadriplegics. In addition, researchers are using the same technique
experimentally to provide sense input from prosthetic limbs. Similar
techniques are being used, again experimentally, to sense the activations
of motor nerves at amputation sites, to drive the motions of powered
prosthetic limbs.
Neuroplasticity is the phenomenon wherein the brain will
reconstruct damaged portions and functions can migrate between
radically different areas of the nervous system. It is implicated in all sorts
 Products are already showing up on the market with flexible
low-resolution liquid crystal-based wraps that can change color. Similar
technologies are being used in experimental color- changing cloth. E-ink
displays are improving in quality and falling in price—flexible and
colored versions with faster update speeds are coming. While the cut of
clothing may continue to be static for a while yet, color and graphics will
become more mutable.
We may be able to make an implantable version of one of these
displays as well, but there are other options, too. While I've largely
looked at hard technologies here and not at bioengineering, one option
that’s too interesting to pass up is working with the color-changing
chromatophores of cephalopods—instead of getting tattoos, get skin
grafts. While the designs would be nominally under more mechanical
control, might the basic biological nature of the grafts show through?
The idea of humans having similar affective responses, changing color as
a stress reaction, would be fascinating. Humans could literally grow
entire new affective capabilities.
at impedance-based measurements of lung fluid, another dispensing an
emergency bronchial dilator when needed, and a third archiving
information and periodically talking to an external device via radio.
The challenges here are nontrivial, of course. Power management is a
huge concern, as the devices currently run on batteries that must last five
to eight years. Some newer implants use inductive charging, and there's a
chance that low-power devices could run on biofuel cells that take power
directly from the body, parasitically. The security and privacy concerns
for inter- implant and implant-external communication are also
nontrivial, especially as implants cannot currently afford the CPU or
storage required to perform modern cryptography. Moore’s law has a way
of making at least some of these problems go away, however.
Advances in microfluidics, a technology wherein minute amounts of
fluid are pumped around through channels cut into silicon wafers at a
similar scale to the transistors on a chip, are allowing the rapid
miniaturization of diagnostics that currently require full-scale
laboratories. Disease detection is a significant research priority for
medical microfluidics, and reusable devices that can detect multiple
diseases are already on the research horizon. As the devices are
constructed primarily via traditional semiconductor fabrication
techniques, they're likely to follow fairly similar cost and capability
trajectory.
As we come to understand implants better and the risk of
implantation surgery drops, diagnostic implants are likely to become
more attractive from a risk/benefit perspective. It is likely, even, that a
general-purpose implant capable of continuously monitoring the state of
the body and detecting a wide range of diseases accurately (and, given
continuous monitoring and in-body positioning, much earlier than with
conventional techniques) will be seen as a reasonable component of
preventative care. As these devices become widespread, a flexible system
of authentication and authorization will be necessary, if nothing else to
handle cases of emergency medicine and child and elder care. Why not
enable them for personal uses too?
This, of course, brings up all sorts of other scenarios. If someone
reprograms their implant to lie about their HIV+ status and you are
exposed, it seems likely that a crime has occurred. But what crime? The
intentional HIV exposure or the reprogramming of the implant?An
implant could also be useful if you are out drinking—telling you when
you are getting dangerously intoxicated, or, for instance, if it suddenly
detects GHB in your bloodstream. While this might be very useful in
making that night on the town safer, it could cut both ways. If you are a
victim of date rape, could the rapist subpoena data from your implant to
prove that you were not so intoxicated that you couldn't consent? Is an
implant part of you, and thus subject to Fifth Amendment rights
preventing you from testifying against yourself, in the case of something
like a DUI charge? Or is it just another external computing device,
despite its uniquely privileged location?
Relevant to: Intimacy, Identity and Control
Timeline: 15 years
Mutable Appearance
Virtual projections of identity are great, but what about actual
physical changes? The catalog of the ways humans have altered
themselves and their appearances is large and exhaustive, but the
constant is that with the exception of things like hair and makeup, the
body generally changes and is changed slowly—even clothing changes on
the course of hours, unless you have an atypically hyperactive personal
costuming department. What about creating situational physical
identities? There are plenty of reasons to do this, and not just acceptance
by a monoculture—fractured network social spaces provide for
complicated terrain to navigate, and you might want to become several
different versions of yourself in a day.
You wake up in the morning and go about your usual routine. You
toss on a t-shirt and jeans and head for the train. On the train, you pull
out your phone and dial your jeans and your t-shirt to the color that
feels right for the day. You poke around online and find a cute little
animation that looks good, and you grab a frame from it and toss it onto
your t-shirt. Just a still—nothing too flashy for the morning.
You get to work, and the tattoos on your right arm fade in slowly; it's
a relaxing day. Your skin changes a little through the day, fading blank
when you have an older, conservative client to talk to, blending into a
darker, more aggressive design as you bike across town in the afternoon.
In the evening, at the club, your shirt is cycling through something
vaguely biomechanical, all gears and tentacles, and you see your recent
ex-girlfriend. Your skin flashes black in shock for a second and then you
slip out the back.
 Of course, if you are triggering neurochemical changes in response to
outside behavior, you could trigger them in response to all sorts of things Relevant to: Intimacy, Identity and Control
—similar to orgasms, you could give someone a neurochemical remote;
Timeline: Now
an emotional organ of sorts, to play your brain.

Orgasm Control

In some stereotypically masculine worldviews, orgasms define sex. If

you came, you had sex. This blatantly ignores the fact that many women
are either pre-orgasmic or will frequently not have an orgasm during
many sex acts they participate in—even sometimes ones they quite enjoy.
On top of this are all sorts of fetishes specifically about the act of having
an orgasm, chief among them various forms of orgasm denial.
What if all this could be controlled at the push of a button?
Orgasms are a function of the same part of the nervous system that
controls breathing, heartbeat, and similar activities. There is a point on
the sacral nerve that can be used to trigger them with electrical
stimulation. In addition to triggering orgasms, you can, with careful
measurement, detect them, and by suppressing the firing of those nerves
(by applying an inverted electrical impulse in real time), you can
suppress them. The first of these is a function easily performed by
current implanted medical devices—exactly that kind of
neurostimulation is exactly what most of them already do, and successful
clinical trials have already occurred in North Carolina. Sensing is
somewhat more difficult, but entirely within our current reach, and
while reliable suppression might be currently difficult, it is largely an
engineering challenge, not one of fundamental research.
From a simple perspective, you could call this the ultimate sex toy.
Push a button, have an orgasm. Dial knobs for intensity and duration.
Decoupling orgasms from their normal context is interesting, too—how
does that change the experience? As a dominance/submission device,
what happens if you set up the control unit to work remotely and give
the button to someone else semi-permanently, with an implant set up
such that you cannot orgasm without it?
On the other hand, what about a monitoring-only device? How
would a monitoring device change state treatment of sex offenders?
What happens when you require a sex offender to account for the timing
and location of every orgasm? While obviously the roots of sex offense
are complicated, does a push-button orgasm help them re-integrate into
society and resist offending again?
Other people might be interested in a monitoring device, too—it
could be the ultimate purity ring, verifiable evidence that the person you
are sleeping with has never had an orgasm, regardless of whether or not
they have tried. And with push-button control, no more having to learn
how to actually please someone sexually.
What would a device like this do to sex work? Would people with the
implants still patronize sex workers, assuming they were otherwise
inclined to? If so, how would it change that interaction? Would it
become more explicitly about human touch, and less about getting off?
Would sex workers use the implants themselves?
Relevant to: Intimacy,
Timeline: 20 years
Endocrine Management
A heartbeat is a single measure of physiological state, and a coarse
one. What about the endocrine system? We are coming to understand
just how heavily our mood, how our bodies perform, and how we think
and perceive things are all dependent on a small number of brain
chemicals. These are obviously very complex systems, to be tampered
with very carefully. But, as we come to understand them better, we may
be able to both monitor and alter the balances of these neurotransmitters
in real time, again using implanted devices. While we currently act on
the brain’s chemical balance with drugs, these are, relatively speaking,
very crude devices. In addition to allowing us to perform the same kinds
of therapies much more accurately, working in real time allows us to
introduce new behavior-oriented functions.
What effect could interacting directly with your partner’s endocrine
system have on the relationship? Imagine an endocrine mirror—carefully
controlled, among other things to prevent feedback effects, but designed
to nudge you toward similar affective states. While it could easily trigger
entirely new kinds of codependency, it could also allow for radically
more compatible interactions. Especially interesting would be the effect
on distance—feeling what your partner feels, despite knowing that they
are separated from you by hundreds or thousands of miles.
Even if the effects are isolated to a single person, situationally-based
alterations of neurochemistry could have an interesting effect on
relationships. Imagine if an implant gave you a steady drip of oxytocin
whenever you interacted with your partner? Make that first month
relationship honeymoon last forever.
Relevant to: Intimacy
Timeline: Now
Pulse Bracelets
Long-distance relationships are hard. Keeping the kind of daily
awareness and the feeling of connection going that one has with a local
lover takes a lot of work. Technology has already radically changed how
we interact with long distance relationships—Skype, IM, SMS, and flat-
rate phone plans have already made that kind of connection much easier
to keep. Where else can it go?
The daily rhythm of life is expressed in many ways, big and small.
Imagine sharing your heartbeat with a lover. You each have a bracelet
that mirrors the other’s pulse—a little membrane beating away, inside
your wrist. Surprisingly simple things can carry a lot of information
about your partner's life.
The technology behind this one is simple—a GSM modem, a
battery, a heart rate sensor, and a small actuator.
Obviously, at first a bracelet like this would be distracting.
Eventually, though, given enough time to get used to the stimulus, does
it fall into sensory integration? If so, what does that end up meaning—
can you tell when someone wakes up, what the rhythm of their day is,
just from a heartbeat? How does it cross over into in-person interactions?
There are some studies that have shown that even loud music can apply a
synchronizing effect to the heart’s rhythm—would this do that? What
happens when you have multiple partners, and receive multiple
heartbeats via different actuators?
Relevant to: Economics and Control
Timeline: 5 Years
DNA Sequencing for Sex Workers
Sex work occupies complicated, conflicted political space in the
modern left. That said, it is safe to state that in most current legal
regimes the majority of sex workers engaging in heteronormative sex acts
are at a power disadvantage to their clients.
In order for a sex worker to operate, their clients must be able to find
them in at least some context; the clients can often be relatively
anonymous outside of the moment of transaction. The sex worker,
already disadvantaged by this, is often more legally vulnerable while the
client may only be socially vulnerable.
Imagine that you are a sex worker. Your most recent session has gone
poorly, and the client did not pay. You are not in a position, normally, to
ask for anything like identification that might give you any recourse.
Your client, however, cannot avoid leaving DNA material behind. You
swab a sample into a paperback-sized DNA sequencer. Ten minutes later,
you anonymously upload the sequence and find a match in a public
genetic database. The sequencer signs its sample with an anonymized but
verifiable signature. You add a note describing the circumstance under
which the sample was taken, and let Google do the rest.
DNA sequencers are getting amazingly fast and spectacularly cheap,
and the trend shows no sign of slowing down. There are questions about
how strong DNA evidence really is, but tactically, that may not matter—
the social onus will probably still end up being on the person whose
DNA was posted, to explain what happened or why someone wanted to
frame them.
 temporary power of attorney to a call center employee who's acting on
Relevant to: Awareness and Control your prior instructions? While obviously the only meaningful solution
for sexual assault is for people to stop assaulting others, would something
Timeline: 10 years
like this fill a useful role in allowing people to balance inebriation and
the morning after?

Outsourcing Judgment

People do a lot of stupid stuff while drunk, high, or otherwise not all
that with it. A lot of that stupid stuff involves sex. Sometimes your
friends will step in, but they're not always around, and they might be the
problem. How much can someone be protected from themselves?
Take a pair of glasses with a camera in them that stream video
remotely, and add a speakerphone and an implant that measures blood
alcohol. Before you decide to go out drinking, you figure out what the
limits you would like to set for your evening.
Later that night, you walk up to the bar to get another drink, and
your glasses flash an icon at you, telling you that you have had enough.
The bartender notices it and shakes his head at you.
Later, elsewhere, you have ended up somewhere secluded with
someone you have been flirting with. A voice in your ear warns you that
you are not sober enough to decide to sleep with someone, per the limits
you set earlier. You ignore it. A little bit longer, and your phone trips
over into speakerphone mode and informs your the other person that
you are not sober enough to consent, and that per prior agreement, you
are not currently legally in charge of your actions. You end up safely at
home alone, without another embarrassing complication to deal with,
along with a much less painful headache than you might have had.
Portable streaming video and microdisplays are already common
enough technology, although combining them into a socially acceptable
package has been a challenge for a long time. The implant technology is
somewhat more complicated, but entirely within the realm of current
possibility. The legal perspective for something like this becomes more
interesting—is it possible to create a contract which gives away a